Feminism Can Really Kill The Mood

According to Psychology Today, women are twice as likely as men to report an inability to get turned on by their partner. Also according to Psychology Today: “Gender equality inhibits arousal.”

And then they include a series of romance novel covers to prove their point because what good does it do to make a point if you don’t have sketches of women in submissive positions to back it up?

The majority of women have submission fantasies. From classic romance The Flame and The Flower to classic erotica The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty to Twilight BDSM fan fiction, submission themes are immensely popular in cross-cultural female erotica. The fact of the matter is that most heterosexual women are wired to find sexual submission arousing—and so are most female mammals.

Consider Rattus norvegicus, the Norwegian rat. The female performs stereotyped physical actions associated with sexual interest. First is pacing: running and stopping, inducing a male to chase her. This culminates in lordosis: assuming a submissive stationary posture with arched back and raised hips. Lordosis is controlled by a specific region of the hypothalamus, a subcortical brain structure. An analogous part of the brain controls submission postures in female primates.

In male rats, another part of the hypothalamus controls stereotyped dominance activity, such as mounting a female and performing intromission.

Ah, yes. Comparing women to characters in Twilight fanfic sounds perfectly scientific to me. Plus, the author went to the trouble of including a photo of mice having sex, which was something I honestly never thought I’d get to see in my lifetime, so kudos to this “study” for pulling out all the stops.

In general, a good portion of this article is the persistent beating of a dead horse – “Women like deep voices and alpha males!” and “Feminist women are turned off by sensitive men!” – but it does try to play devil’s advocate toward the end by saying that some men like being submissive:

So if your boyfriend is wired to prefer sexual submission, then role-playing “The Rape of the Sabine Women” probably won’t solve your arousal problems… not unless you’re one of the even smaller portion of women born with active dominance circuitry—and your boyfriend plays the Sabine.

Well, there you go. As long as you can find yourself an alpha male who wants you to be dominant (note: make sure you’re really dealing with an alpha male though and not one of those “feminist men”, as they will be completely incapable of turning you on), you probably stand a chance at having one of those orgasms all of your male friends keep talking about.

Then again, this would put you in the position of being a dominant female which –unless you were wired with “active dominance circuitry”- is highly unlikely and generally unattractive.

But don’t worry, gals. I’m sure they’re working on a pill right now to help you with your “problem”.